Curator Thomas Christensen champions digital restoration

FJI correspondent Marsha McCreadie reports on an eye-opening lecture at New York University on digital movie restoration.

If you didn’t know Thomas Christensen’s impeccable curatorial credentials, and setting aside that he looks as beatific as Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc when he’s talking about film restoration, one of his two favorite topics (the other being Carl Dreyer, the Danish D. W. Griffith, whose films Christensen has curated and digitally restored), there is a moment or two when you feel you might be at a high-tech convention in Vegas with a knowledgeable salesman promoting his most recent line of digital products.

Hardly. Christensen is curator at the Danish Film Institute and secretary general of the European Association of Cinémathèques, holding forth on what he feels is the solution to the (old) problem of the disappearance of film stock, negatives or even entire movies, and the newer issue of the conversion to digital cinema. He spoke last week to a group of professional film restorers and technicians, film students and professors at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, in English so conversationally perfect, and a personal style so casually approachable, he could also pass for a Midwestern graduate student. He did get an M.A. in film studies from the University of Wisconsin (David Bordwell’s fiefdom) before returning to his native Denmark.

Christensen made no secret of his approach to film restoration, with his talk called “Danish Film Heritage Goes Digital.” He is a man on a mission, the project leader for the European Film Gateway, an initiative for creating “a single entry to digitized European film heritage of cinema.” (See Kevin Lally’s recent FJI post on an American response to the fact that since January 2012, there are more digital-cinema screens in the world than 35mm.) Not to bury the lead, the main objection among film purists is that digital film versions can be harsh, sometimes glaring if in color, not poetic or emotive, and without the subtleties of 35mm film, or its aesthetic gradations. No problem. Sooner or later, Christiansen said, digital will develop in ways to allow for more variations.

That’s when I bought in.

Drawing a distinction between traditional film-restoration techniques (and giving a brief overview of slide numbering, tinting recommendations, and a log book) and digital restoration, he opts for the latter, always working with the best surviving or original release version—hopefully the one intended by the film’s creator—and ultimately remastering it in “a version that plays well.” He did not take up the process of sound conversion.

Overall, he slyly observed, “It is important to not do evil things to collections.”
Those evil things are:

1) No use of substitution of image elements (though the French might do it)
2) No use of secondary grading tools
3) No image stabilization
4) No de-graining
5) No automated dust and scratch removal

Everything made sense, except for number 5. What could possibly be bad about taking out dust and scratches? Christensen answered that it was very hard to do this without potentially removing parts of a film. Still, he said, it’s possible to be too purist, laughing that Japanese restorers, for instance, like to keep everything they find, including a spot on a film. As for the snide-sounding remark about the French, he explained that whenever you add something to a film, even if it’s an educated guess as to the filmmaker’s purpose, you risk changing the meaning of the image. He went so far as to call it “cheating” because often there is no hard evidence what films originally looked like.

So much for the not-to-do list. As for the mission, he advises: “Be creative in regards to technology and access it, but be careful not to lose quality and authenticity,” reminding his audience that the “creative re-use and re-purposing of heritage objects can be powerful components in new cultural products, but their value is based on retaining an unbroken link to the past.”

Sounds great, but what about technicians who daily work at processing labs? One audience member spoke agitatedly in defense of his deadlined work methods; on the other side, a film professor complained in a long theoretical discourse about the entire digital conversion. Christensen maintained his cool, saying that people who work in commercial film labs are simply doing their job, not “bad people,” and naturally are not considering film history every minute they work. And that ideally restoration work should rest on negotiations between film archivists and film historians deciding what film or version to restore. Who knew the talk would turn so controversial?

Down to cases. The presentation packed the biggest punch in showing what happens when a print has faded, and images start to disappear. Blues and yellows go first, says Christensen, and reds remain. In an unidentified image of the Cologne Bridge, one digitally restored and one not, the proof was all in the pudding.

This was the takeaway moment of the evening, prepared for by a nod from Christensen in the direction of those who have gone before, with a reverential mention of Eileen Bowser, the famed former film curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. It reminded this writer of an interview with the quietly determined Bowser decades ago when she seemed worried that, even during an hour interview, cellulose nitrate in storage might be losing the battle against time.

Apparently as good at sound bytes as he is at scrupulously restoring film, Christensen said that, ultimately, “to preserve and restore is to show.”